DRAW THE WRONG WAY
When you have to come up with a creative solution, you need to feel free to draw like you have never drawn before. And this typically means that you end up drawing the wrong...
Author: Kurt
CINEMATIC LECORBUSIER
I believe that LeCorbusier was very dependent upon pictures and photographs to make his architecture. His books are stuffed full of photographs of ships and machines. I pretty sure that when he was designing...
TRANSPARENT CONTOUR DRAWING
Certainly one of the most powerful tools with which to see is the contour drawing. I guess that is why authors such as Nicolaides in his The Natural Way To Draw essentially starts his...
TRANSPARENT WEAVING
We ran across the weaving of Ethel Stein at the Art Institute of Chicago last fall. She is a mater weaver who, at 96 years old, is only now coming into the recognition that...
WHAT A THOUGHT LOOKS LIKE
Bucky Fuller believed that the tetrahedron was the most efficient enclosure that humans can create in the Newtonian world. A tetrahedron has four points which then create enclosures with four sides. These four points...
ASSOCIATIVE CONFIDENCE
We typically categorize smart people based on their ability to recall facts. Our entire educational system is based upon this premise. My personal belief is that each of us has a more or less...
RANDOM MODERNIST BUILDING
Sometimes a building that you see stays in your imagination. This happened recently during a visit to Vancouver. While riding bicycles around the city, we happened to ride past this random modernist pavilion which...
ANOTHER VIEW ON ART
Architecture is art and it cannot help but be anything but. These are the thoughts of Gieselmann and Ungers in their writing published in 1963. In these pages, we have been debating whether architecture...
CONVERSATION FORMS
The above drawing depicts something that I call Conversation Forms. The idea is that each of our thoughts, precepts, etc. can be summarized by a three dimensional polygonal form. This form would be established...
RELATIVITY
We live in curved spacetime. At least this is what the theory of relativity tells us. Space is curved by gravity. Therefore the space upon which we inhabit the earth is curved. It is...
EARLY PERSPECTIVE THINKERS
During the 1620s, Francis Bacon, a Franciscan monk, composed the Opus Majus. This was intended to be a compendium of the knowledge of the world. As we may expect from a Franciscan monk, he...
ARCHITECT BLOGS OF NOTE
There are two architect blogs that pertain to sketching, watercolors and architecture that are fun to check out. Frank Harmon, who is an architect, has a nice blog titled Native Places. This link was...
CROWN HALL HOMAGE
One of the themes that has developed in these pages is the worship of famous buildings. At first, I was not sure why I was compelled to draw famous buildings. But now I get...
THREE DIMENSIONAL SOUL
Bernhard Hoetger was a sculptor who also designed buildings. In 1928, he wrote. “We want no inhibitions and checks by recipes, we want the free spirit to find its own laws. The creative moment...
VISUAL SERENDIPITY
A word that I keep coming back to is associative. If our drawings promote and foster associations in our minds, then they have added value. And we have mentioned Google Images as a medium...
DRAWING IS DEAD
I respectfully note the passing of Michael Graves, Architect, who died yesterday at the age of 80. The Postmodern Movement, which Graves championed, was gaining its’ full strength while I was in architecture school....
THE 3D SOLID PROBLEM
All we can draw are planes. We cannot render the volume inside a solid. In the drawing above, there is a solid and a void within the cube. The dark green solid part is...
SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION
Stanislaw Ulam, speaking in Los Alamos in 1944. “I found out that the main ability to have was a visual, and also an almost tactile, way to imagine the physical situation, rather than a...
DREAM DRAWING
Mr. Manish Udar, in a recent contribution to the LinkedIn conversation that can be found here, mentioned the phenomenon of analogue drawings triggering dreams. I wonder if any one else has had a dream...
SCIENTIFIC METHOD
To operate successfully in science, you first advance a hypothesis. And then you have to make a judgement on this hypothesis based on direct empirical observation. In design, our we make empirical observations based...
BETWEEN CONCEPTION AND REPRESENTATION
I have shown my clients Transparent Drawings, and this has only increased their enthusiasm and excitement toward the design. There is a competitive advantage to the presentation of rational and explanatory hand drawings. And...
TRANSPARENT THUMBNAILS
I like social media better than I used to. Because of the interesting discussion that has sprung up on a small corner of LinkedIn, as I mentioned earlier, I am starting to see a...
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